Coffee Subscription Free Trials and First-Box Offers, Read Properly

Almost every coffee subscription opens with an offer: a free bag, a percentage off, a discount across the first few orders. They are real savings, and they are also designed to get you past the first month, after which the full price applies. The useful question is not which offer is biggest but what the second month costs you.

The three kinds of offer

A free first bag. Atlas Coffee Club and Bean Box both give one when you join. Trade gives the first bag free on its Discovery Trial. This is the best offer if you are unsure, because you can take the bag and cancel at a cost of nothing or, at worst, the delivery.

One discount on the first order. Peet's takes 30% off a new subscription and Volcanica 20% off the first order. Worth having, but it only helps once.

A discount across several orders. Stumptown takes 15% off the first five orders and Intelligentsia 20% off the first four. Origin's subscription is the most generous structure of all: 25% off the first three orders, then 10% off every order after that for as long as you stay. Blue Bottle adds 10% if you prepay the first three shipments. These are worth more than a single discount if you intend to keep the subscription.

We describe the offers rather than quote codes, because codes change and a page carrying an expired one is worse than a page carrying none. Each service shows its current offer at sign-up.

Where free is not quite free

Shipping is where a free trial can cost you. Atlas includes it. Bean Box charges a flat delivery rate on subscription orders and does not publish the figure, so the free bag carries a charge you will only see at checkout. Trade Coffee charges shipping unless you prepay or choose its 2 lb plan, so the Discovery Trial's free bag may not reach you free.

Nine of the twelve services we list include shipping on subscription orders, and our list of coffee subscriptions with free shipping is the quickest way to avoid the question altogether.

What renews, and when

Every one of these offers turns into a paid subscription unless you cancel. That is not a trick; it is what a subscription is. But it means the date that matters is the next charge, which comes before the next delivery.

Trade is the only service that publishes the gap, one day's notice to change an order. The rest describe skipping and cancelling without stating a cut-off. If you are taking a free bag to test, cancel or skip as soon as it arrives rather than waiting to see if you like it, then restart if you do. Every service we list lets you cancel from your own account, and none asks for more than one delivery.

Guarantees

Only two services say anything about refunds. Atlas offers a 30 day money-back guarantee. Trade offers a replacement rather than a refund, and only on the first bag, which is a sensible answer to a quiz that got your taste wrong but not a guarantee in the usual sense.

The other ten publish nothing either way. That does not mean they refuse, only that there is no promise to hold them to.

Working out what the offer is really worth

Add up what you will pay over the first three months with the offer, then what you will pay over the next three without it. If the second figure is one you are happy with, the offer is a bonus. If you are only signing up because of the first figure, the offer has done its job on you rather than for you.

Price per kilo is the fairest way to compare the full price once the offer ends, and it reorders the field more than the offers do. We work through it in are coffee subscriptions worth it.